While working in a Railway Workshop in Lucknow I discovered that I had to sign sixteen daily reports every afternoon. All these reports were physically carried by a person travelling to Northern Railway Head Quarters in Delhi by an overnight train. The year was nineteen eighty eight and there was no email, no fax nor any other electronic means to transmit the documents. They had to be carried personally. Someone or the other, generally a favourite of my Office Superintendent, was earning traveling allowance as a regular source of income.
There was a Type Section in a large hall with over a dozen typists, who worked on Remington and Godrej machines to type myriad documents the most prominent ones being the sixteen reports. There was a supervisor designated the Office Superintendent Type Section, or OS Type. Krishna, the OS Type, would decide whose handwritten papers would be rendered into typeface and and by which typist. The most accomplished typists were deputed to create neat and error-free documents for the head of the office. The type section had the old substitute of a photocopy machine, the Kores carbon paper. Inserted between rice-paper sheets the combination could spew out upto five or six copies of the document in one go. Documents of the Bada Sahib, of course, were typed using fresh carbons and even the sixth copy would be easily legible.
Coming back to the reports, I found that I was signing all the reports mechanically without even reading them and couldn’t understand the purpose of many of them. I wondered if anyone read them in the HQ either. So, one day, after I got tired of mindlessly authenticating six copies each of those seemingly useless reports, I told the OS to stop sending them. Not a single report would go. He was aghast, “But Sir, won’t we be pulled up by the HQ bosses?” I am sure the OS Type was more anxious about his raison d'être, which primarily appeared to be the flourishing of these reports every day. He himself didn’t know what any of those reports meant. He was simply handed a stack of handwritten papers, which he diligently converted into presentable yet meaningless official despatches.
I told him not to worry and that no report should be sent from then on until someone noticed in the HQ. But the OS said, “Sir, I think I will still type them and keep them stored in case we are asked for all the past reports some day. What if someone wakes up to them in the Head Quarters? He just couldn’t think of keeping his dozen typists idle for the whole afternoon twiddling their thumbs instead of battering the keyboards with their fingers. I could sense that the main thought in his mind was that he would be robbed of the very purpose of his employment. So, I told him to keep the typing work going as usual.
Nothing happened for a few days; no reaction on the missing reports from the Head Quarters. Nobody in New Delhi had noticed the missing despatches. Then, someone called and complained that a particular report was not reaching him. Then again, a few more persons called. Finally, six reports were found missing by someone or the other. So, I called Krishna, the OS Type, to resume sending those six reports. The remaining ten reports were never demanded and never sent again. Thus were saved many-many trees and Krishna’s purpose in life. The environment was thus protected as well. Sea levels will not rise for another century.
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